The 12 Games of Christmas 1. Legendary with Dark City

In this series I am going to be providing a series of mini reviews of 12 games that we played over the festive period.

The marvel deckbuilding game, Legendary from Upper Deck has become a quick favourite in our house. Being set in the Marvel universe it draws on familiarity and nostalgia for the theme for its enjoyment, but those two things would not be enough without a solid, if somewhat simple game underneath.

Legendary is a co-op game, with a victory point mechanic that allows for players to assign glory to the best player. All the players are working together to defeat the mastermind and thwart the scheme. The schemes themselves change the game mechanics and determine the winning and losing conditions. By simply introducing a new scheme you play an entire different game of Legendary. Combining different schemes with different masterminds gives you a new game every time you play.

So what does Dark City bring to the table? More of that variation! There are 17 new heroes in the set, which is actually more than in the base game. The heroes contain some of the darker characters in the marvel universe, such as, Blade, Punisher and Daredevil, whilst adding in some more well known characters such as Professor X, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler. The new heroes also introduce two new keywords. Versatile allows the Hero to use attack as recruit or vice versa. Teleport allows the player to move cards he doesn't want to use into his next hand, in addition to the standard six he would normally draw.

However, while the heroes bring some new flavour to the game its the other stuff in the box that really brings in the variation. 8 new schemes and 5 new masterminds brings the totals up to 16 and 9 respectively. That’s 144 variations you could play before you’ve tried out each combination once! In addition to this Dark City adds more villain groups too bringing in well known villains such as Rhino and Electro but it also adds the welcome addition of new bystander cards that have special effects when they are rescued.

All in all Dark City gives you more of everything and brings some fan favourite characters and villains to the table while amping up the difficulty with masterminds like Apocalypse and Kingpin. If you enjoyed Legendary then pick this up while its still available in the UK and if you enjoy the deck building genre, co-op games and the Marvel universe then you owe it to yourself to try and get your hands on a copy of the base game. Legendary is a simple game, but its full of variety, it plays fast and it has a theme I love.